“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.” –Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Fascinating Facts and Trivia.
Daniel Levinson and Erika Broadhurst argue that the threat of doctors abusing drugs, including drug use that involves reusing needles on patients, requires drug testing of doctors:
Hospitals can do more to protect patients. Improved security, such as surveillance of drug storage areas, tighter chain of custody on drugs, and better tracking of controlled substances are obvious areas to target.
ut we should go further. We believe hospitals should be required to perform random drug tests on all health care workers with access to drugs. The tests should be comprehensive enough to screen for fentanyl and other commonly abused drugs and must keep up with evolving drug abuse patterns.
This is hardly a radical suggestion. By federal law, many workers in transportation or other safety-sensitive areas are already subject to random drug tests. These include pilots, school bus drivers, truck drivers, flight attendants, train engineers, subway operators, ship captains and pipeline emergency response crews.
Everyone enjoys visiting Google and seeing a clever doodle celebrating a famous figure or event in human history, but the feminist collective SPARK noticed one glaring problem: the doodles didn’t reflect human diversity.
They write:
Now that the SPARK team has (almost) recovered from being totally mind-blown by the statistics we’ve uncovered, we’re demanding that Google make a concerted effort to change such a blatant imbalance. We want them to acknowledge the problem, but we also want more: we want Google to publicly commit to improving these numbers. We’d be happy to help out—in fact, we’ve already gotten a head start bycompiling a list of historical heroes that totally deserve Doodles, and that way Google has to do less research.
Discuss it here.
The creators of a new app called Spritz are claiming to have developed a program that will greatly increase our ability to read quickly, something seemingly quite necessary in an era in which we read 54,000 words a day.
Not everyone agrees that’s possible:
Keith Rayner, a psycholinguist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told me that he thinks “all speed-reading claims are nonsensical.”
Spritz’ technique, called rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP, isn’t new, and Rayner said it causes the same comprehension problems as other strategies.
“We’ve known forever that people can go fast with one word at a time,” he said. “But if you have them read more than single sentences, then comprehension breaks down because words are coming at you faster than you can deal with them.”
200, 000 have applied for a one way ticket to Mars, according to Mental Floss. Mars One Way” documents the thoughts and theories of Five hopeful Mars One astronauts as they contemplate the reality of leaving planet Earth forever, for a new home on Mars.
This movie on Vimeo explains why some would do so.